“Now, please don’t be rational,” pleaded Clara, “I know exactly what you are going to say--but after all she must marry somebody, you know, and where is the harm of an eligible establishment? Perhaps it would be as well if mamma did not use the word--but still!--oh! to be sure, dear, good, kind Bertie--the children are quite right,” said Clara, with a sweet suffusion of kindness and good feeling over all her face--“I am sure I love him every bit as much as I love Maurice--he was always like a brother, the dear fellow! I don’t say Alice should not be interested in him; but only it’s all her romance, you know. She’s not in love with him--if she were in love with him, I couldn’t say a word--it’s only sympathy, and friendship, and sisterhood, and all that; and because he’s in trouble she’ll forget all about herself, and send this good man, who is very fond of her, away.” “These young ladies, you see, Clara,” said I, “they are not at all to be depended on; they never will attend to what we experienced people say.” “Ah, yes, that is true,” said Alice’s younger sister, with a sigh of serious acquiescence, and the simplest good faith. Clara, with her five babies, had forgotten that she was not her sister’s senior--while Alice, for her part, looking down from her quiet observatory in her brown silk dress upon Clara’s wonderful toilettes and blooming beauty, felt herself a whole century older than that pretty matron-sister, who was always so sweetly occupied with life, and had so little time for thought. I smiled upon them both, being near twenty years their senior, and thought them a couple of children still. So we all go on, thinking ourself the wisest always. In these days I began to moralize a little. I have no doubt Miss Polly had similar thoughts of me. CHAPTER XVI.